Fog of War, 1908
Every hidden-army game on this site — HollowPals, BluffForge, Build-a-Bot — goes back to one patent, filed in Paris in 1908 by a woman of fifty-six whose life before then is almost unknown. This page tells what the sources say, and marks where they disagree.
The patent
On 26 November 1908, Hermance Edan applied for a French patent for un jeu de bataille avec pièces mobiles sur damier — a battle game with movable pieces on a board. Its central idea was the fog: each player’s pieces stand with their ranks facing their owner, so you learn what an enemy piece is only when two pieces meet. Everything else you must reason out from how pieces move.
The game was shown at a Paris inventors’ fair in 1909, sold in France through the department store La Samaritaine, and reached Britain before the First World War. A British firm made it for decades, and the hidden-army games sold today descend from it.
How sure are we?
Settled
- Hermance Edan filed a French patent for “a battle game with movable pieces on a board” on 26 November 1908. Both Wikipedia articles give the date, and it is attached to a patent number.
- It was granted as French patent no. 396.795 in 1909 (Wikipedia gives 5 February 1909). A patent number can be looked up in the national register — the strongest kind of record here.
- In 1909 she showed the game at the Concours Lépine, the Paris inventors’ fair, alongside another game of hers, Vite au But. Stated in the biography article.
- She was born on 21 December 1851 and died on 2 May 1934, both in Paris, and kept designing and publishing games until her death. From the biography article; it also notes that nothing is known of her life before 1908.
Disputed
- When was the game first sold as “L’Attaque”, and by whom? One account says she published it herself in 1909; another says the firm Au Jeu Retrouvé began selling it under that name in 1910.
- When did the British maker H.P. Gibson & Sons take it on? Accounts give “around 1920”, “the 1920s” and 1925. All agree Gibson made it for decades afterward.
- Where did the idea come from? The historian Thierry Depaulis reports that papers from her estate say she developed the game in the 1880s. The historian Michel Boutin argued she was influenced by the Japanese game Gunjin Shōgi. We have not seen the primary papers ourselves, so we show both claims.
Think it through
- Why does a patent number count as stronger evidence than a date in a sales listing?
- For the question of where the idea came from: what new document would change your mind, and which way?
- Playing a hidden-army game means reasoning from partial evidence about pieces you cannot see. In what ways is reading these sources the same kind of reasoning — and in what ways is it different?